On trips, my brother increasingly met men of a certain age who turned out to be from New York. He would play chess with them, though Nicholas was not, in any sense, a player of the game. None of the men ever seemed to mind when Nicholas asked, as he always did, why the game had to go on after the capture of his queen.

“I mean,” Nicholas always asked, “isn’t that more or less it?”

The year in Chichén Itzá, the last trip we took together, when he saw the man with white chest hair by the pool, Nicholas came over from his chaise and sat on my towel.

I could smell his suntan cream because I used oil. Even his skin was different. There was nothing about him that I thought was the same.

Nicholas began to rub my back. But what he gave me was not a backrub. He moved up with his hands from the waistband of my trunks and came around under my arms, until I felt his fingers pulling at my hairs in front.

My brother lowered his lips to my ear.

He whispered, “You could throw that down in front of a fire and have a symposium on it. You could do frottage.”

To “have a symposium” was one of my brother’s several euphemisms for bed. Nicholas never called things by their names if he could call them something else. He was saying that the man’s white chest hair was the proverbial fur rug.

I felt my brother’s fingers. I felt his breath in my ear.

He whispered, “Do you think it’s a merkin?”

Merkin was one of my brother’s favorite words that year. It was the year of merkin and frottage. We had been through the years of panache, of faux pas, of de trop.

I answered that I did not think it was a merkin. I suggested that no one would be apt to wear a white merkin.

“You’re right,” my brother whispered. He pulled a hair out from my front and laughed when I winced.

“When you’re as old as he is,” Nicholas whispered, “I want you to dye these merkins. I want you to do that for me. I want you to promise now to dye these merkins for Big Mama.”

Nicholas sometimes called himself Big Mama. I think it was his way to remind me that he was the one who was the child.

“Promise Big Mama,” my brother whispered that afternoon in front of the man in the open madras shirt.

“Promise Big Mama now.”

Nicholas waited until the third day to climb the pyramid. It was the prospect of a photograph, I think, that got him to the top. I told him that I would take his picture up there, with all the view around him.

“Never mind the view,” he said. “Skip the view.”